On Monday 13th November 2017, sixty years to the day since 1957 when Skylark sounding rocket SL04 became the first British rocket to reach space, the Science Museum in London celebrated by opening a small exhibition exploring the story behind this remarkable achievement.

Now more than 21 billion km from Earth, for the first time in 37 years Voyager 1 has fired up its back-up attitude control thrusters to test the possibility of realigning its antenna and extending the time its signals can be picked up on Earth by up to three years.

The future of humanity in space is inevitably linked with the colonization of other planets, in our Solar System or beyond. Unless our descendants are to live permanently in spacecraft, of whatever dimensions may be feasible with their advanced technology, surfaces of other worlds are our only likely homes in the centuries to come. Which raises questions as to what those surfaces may be like.

The centenary of Sir Arthur C Clarke’s birth is an appropriate time to reflect on the enormous impact which his work has had not only on the world of science fiction, but also on the wider scope of space exploration. We devote the latest issue of Odyssey, which has just been issued, to this subject.

Winner of the Frederick I Ordway III Award, presented at the von Braun lecture at the NASA Marshall Space Fligtht Center in October 2017, Dr. David Baker is recognized for a sustained excellence in space coverage, through books and articles, as well as engagement in the early US space program.

We see the universe from a human point of view. We could hardly be expected to do otherwise. But that doesn’t help if we’re trying to assess the prospects for life, even intelligent life, to have developed on other worlds. It could be that life elsewhere is not even remotely as we know it, and our human way of looking at the cosmos is a serious obstacle to knowing that it’s there.